Memes appeared. Examples of Internet memes

Who is Zhdun, what is “vzhukh” and why everyone around is singing “The ice between us is melting” - you can learn all this from this guide to the most popular memes, which was obtained based on the analysis of tons of funny pictures from social networks.

(Total 53 photos + 4 videos)

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Source: Lifehacker.ru

1. Zhdun

Probably everyone who has ever used social networks has come across pictures with Zhdun. However, not everyone knows the history of the origin of this meme. The picture shows a sculpture by Dutch artist Margriet van Breefort called Homunculus Loxodontus, which translates to “elephant-shaped man.” The strange creature combines the features of a seal and an elephant and depicts a patient sitting in line to see a doctor.

Adaptations of this meme are accompanied by witty captions: “I clicked something and everything disappeared,” “Should I have saved the source?” and dozens of others.

2. Salty handsome

The flamboyant chef Nusret Gokce is the manager of the Nus-Et steakhouse in Dubai. Nusret is an excellent cook, and this is expressed not only in the taste of the dishes, but also in the way the cooking process itself looks. Every gesture of the chef shows his love for his work and remarkable artistry.

Nusret's popularity was brought by his manner of salting steak: the cook takes a pinch of coarse salt and lets it “drip” onto the meat up to the elbow. This gesture with an elegantly raised hand became the basis of the meme.

3. Ukraine and VKontakte

On May 16, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko issued a decree on new sanctions against Russia, including limiting access of Ukrainian users to Yandex, social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. Of course, such blocking has many ways to bypass, but this does not prevent some users from being indignant, and others from doing funny pictures about this theme.

The most popular was the shot from “Fast and the Furious” with cars driving away at a fork. One of the cars depicts the VKontakte logo, the other shows the flag of Ukraine.

4. Drake Dance

This meme has already acquired a substantial beard, but new pictures continue to pop up on social networks to this day. The dance from the Hotline Bling video became a popular meme in America in an instant: users made hundreds of Coub videos, substituting different music for the performer’s movements.

Drake's expressive facial expressions gave rise to meme pictures on the RuNet. A template with two objects and Drake's reaction to each of them became popular. The first object causes rejection: the artist frowns and shields himself with his palm. Drake likes the second one: he breaks into a satisfied smile.

5. Be like Petya

“Be like Petya” is a meme that came to Russia from the Western Internet. The original image with primitive graphics and smart Tim was uploaded by an anonymous user back in March 2010. The storytelling style was picked up by Australian airlines, and hundreds of adaptations appeared on the Internet, but with Smart Bill. The original contained next text: “Tim is on the Internet. Tim sees something that bothers him. Tim walks by. Tim is smart. Be like Tim."

Pictures with smart Petya give users simple life advice. They are pretty obvious, but each of us can name at least a couple of people who do not follow these tips.

6. Keyod Ewumi

Keyode Ewumi is an actor whose face is often seen on social media. The image itself is a still from the show The Hood Documentary, where the character Keyoda talks about his girlfriend: “I think Rachel is beautiful because she can use her head well.”

As a rule, Keyod gives advice that is more likely to make you smile than to be truly useful.

7. Harold Hiding the Pain

Harold is a character discovered by users on the stock photo site Dreamstime. A good-natured smile combined with suffering in the eyes ensured the success of photographs with an unknown elderly man.

Initially, the story of a kind old man who was forced to take pictures as a happy grandfather gained popularity. Over the years, pictures of Harold were used to show painful or awkward feelings with a fake smile on his face.

8. Mr. Dudets

An image of a skull playing a trumpet became popular on the RuNet last fall. According to legend, Mr. Dudet will bless with calcium and strong bones everyone who writes: “Thank you, Mr. Dudet!”

The first documented image of Dudts dates back to 1995, after which he was forgotten for almost 20 years. New life Dudets found in 2016 thanks to “Dvach”. One image of a skull playing a trumpet was enough to turn the discussion thread into an endless string of "Thanks, Mr. Dude!" Thus, anonymous people discredited any dialogues in the topics of the Dvacha forums. Dudets became popular and leaked to social networks.

In addition to its classic use, the meme often appears in music videos. The most popular video was where Dudets played a composition by Australian DJ Timmy Trumpet.

9. The ice between us is melting

This line is from the viral song "Mushrooms" in in social networks V recent months is so common that there is even a petition on Change.Org against the widespread use of this phrase.

It all started with the group's official video, released on March 10. It spawned dozens of parodies, lines from the song are played out in funny pictures, Instagram users make a video for the hit “Mushrooms”, using the appropriate hashtags.

10. Supermind

The expanding brain meme appeared on Reddit as a variation of the Whomst meme. The fact is that many English-speaking users confuse who and whom. The Superintelligence meme pictures are a series of comparison images with the corresponding brain size for each. In this case, as a rule, the most adequate option corresponds to the smallest brain. Thus, in the adaptation of the Whomst meme, the use of who and whom in speech belonged to people with small and medium-sized brains, and those with superintelligence corresponded to the use in speech of the non-existent forms whom’st and whomst’d.

11. Sergey Druzhko

Many people remember the pseudo-documentary program “Inexplicable, but true” and its eccentric host Sergei Druzhko. St. Petersburg resident Nikita Afanasyev and his friend once remembered her. Friends decided to feel nostalgic about their childhood while watching a program about supernatural phenomena. The show itself seemed boring to them, but the host’s out-of-context and dramatic phrases amused the young people.

One day Nikita decided to answer his friend with Sergei Druzhko’s phrase “Are things really that bad?” To do this, he hastily cut out this moment from the program and uploaded it to the video files of the newly created VKontakte public page. The discovery came at the right time: dozens of other phrases from “Inexplicable, but true” were uploaded to the public, and the number of subscribers soon amounted to tens of thousands.

The original public page was closed due to copyright problems, but the author’s work is still alive. More and more video clips with Sergei Druzhko for all occasions appear, and the presenter himself did not resist the sudden popularity and launched the “Druzhko Show” on YouTube.

12. Cat Vzhukh

The peak of popularity of this meme has already passed, but on the social network you can still come across pictures with a wizard cat.

A photo of a cat wearing a festive hat appeared on the English-language Internet in 2013. The image also spread on the RuNet, but the meme acquired its usual form only in 2016. An anonymous user cut out an image of a cat and put it in his paw magic wand and drew magic in the form of clumsy outlines of a spray gun in Paint. And the meme was finalized by adding the phrase “Blow” by a user under the nickname Man-In Gabba.

Pictures with a wizard cat are accompanied by captions about some sudden action, performed as if at the behest of a magic wand.

13. Mined sneaker

Whether to laugh at this meme or not is a moral question, the answer to which we will leave to you. After all, the reason for the inadequacy of some Internet celebrities is usually sad. But the facts are unshakable: the thief in law, who survived an assassination attempt by detonating a booby-trapped slipper, enjoys success on social networks.

The original video was released on the YouTube channel of a user under the nickname Gor Hakobyan in early May. The author was driving along a country road and saw a man sitting in the mud. Having asked what happened to him, the operator did not even suspect that he had stumbled upon an “authority” whose slipper had been mined by ill-wishers.

14. Come on, tell me

The basis of the meme was the facial expression of actor Gene Wilder from the 1971 film “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” In 2011, the phrase You must be new here was added to the frame from the series, which translates as “You must be new here.” In Runet the remark changed to “Come on, tell me...”. What follows is a phrase appropriate to the context.

Sometimes the text in the pictures with this meme deviates from the template, because the expression on Gene Wilder’s face already indicates that the sender does not believe the recipient of the message. By sending a picture with this meme, you seem to be telling your interlocutor: “I know you’re lying to me, but keep going...”

15. Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen

Pico Tarot - fictional character Japanese DJ and comedian Kazuhito Kosaki. In the popular video, Pico sings a song about putting a pen and an apple, a pen and a pineapple, and an apple pen and a pineapple pen together. Some will say that this makes little sense. It is true, but the funny video sequence, the haunting motive and the lightness of the composition ensured the video’s place in the top of YouTube and became the basis for many parodies.

The meme did not remain in active Internet rotation for long, but new videos continue to appear on Piko Taro’s YouTube channel, gaining millions of views.

0 People using the Internet on permanent basis periodically stumble upon various images with hilarious captions, and sometimes they wonder what these pictures are? In this short article, we will just examine such a concept as Meme, which means you can read below.
However, before continuing, I would like to recommend you a few more sensible publications on the subject of memes. For example, what does the “Blood Navalny” meme mean; watch memes about Hitler; what does the meme mean? You can’t just take it; look at memes about Mom, etc.
So let's continue what does Meme mean?? Now memes have become something completely unimaginable just 15 years ago. Back then they were just silly pictures, but now they are essentially becoming another form of mass media.

Memes- something or someone that has become popular in world wide web, and became the subject of mass hype, and expressed in the form of a picture or photograph with a caption

In fact, the word meme was first coined by a professor Dawkins from Oxford in his popular book, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976.
It is in this work that the word “meme” first appears, which Dawkins uses to mean “ unit of cultural information", which can spread very quickly.

The most popular form of memes today is Advice (graphic memes expressed in the form of comics, posters and, of course, pictures).

Some memes act as excellent anti-advertising for certain products. I can assume that the noticeable reduction in the use of Yazhka by adolescents is associated precisely with memes which emphasized the connection between cattle and the Jaguar drink. That is, if you drink Yaga, then you accordingly become cattle and scum in the eyes of others. Therefore, uncertainty began to form in the souls of these teenagers, and the fear that they would be caught with this drink in their hands.
However, having abandoned Yazhka, young people began to use other substances, which, however, does not at all reduce the possibility meme influence people.

Most memes are created precisely in order to leave a positive aftertaste from viewing a picture, to make a person grin, or even scream.
Gradually memes They form in children a sense of what can be done and what situations it is better not to get into so as not to be laughed at. In fact, memes began to shape the thinking of schoolchildren, and whether this is good or bad, we can conclude in twenty years, when former schoolchildren begin to “rule” the country.

Some particularly stubborn individuals, splashing saliva and knocking themselves in the chest with their heels, broadcast that soon memes They will die out like mammoths. However, they do not take into account the fact that this art easily evolves and adapts to its surroundings. Thousands, tens of thousands of authors are sitting at this moment on the next meme, which may well shake all the foundations of the World Wide Web.

Unfortunately, Internet trolling has also made its way among the creators memes, and we can find many pictures that offend individuals. However, you shouldn’t get hung up on this, and you shouldn’t pay attention to this kind of provocation.

After reading this short article, for which special thanks to you, you learned what a meme means and understood how it influences society. From this we can conclude that memas when used skillfully, it can generate not only vile grins, but also bring significant benefits in education and informing citizens.

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A meme is a memorable image or video, often of an entertaining nature, that circulates online.

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Everyone remembers how Zhdun, a gray under-elephant, was walking around the Internet last year. This image contained the image of a person who is really waiting for something - like Hachiko. Subsequently, the picture changed, but the message remained the same. Zhdun was sculpted onto images of queues at Russian Post, in photographs in clinics, etc. All of these were memes that ridiculed some social phenomenon.

How memes appeared

The concept of a meme was first formulated by Dawkins back in 1976. Dawkins called a meme information that is capable of “reproducing on its own.” It is a unit of cultural life that is transmitted from person to person.

And even earlier, in 1898, Bekhterev mentioned a “mental virus”, which, like ordinary viruses, operates everywhere and is transmitted through words, gestures, facial expressions and media.

Nowadays, a meme on the Internet refers to content that is spontaneous, spontaneous.

Virality of memes on social networks

In order for some content to spread faster, you need a platform where it can be published. And we need an audience that will share such content. In Russia, there are several social networks for disseminating such materials. The most popular is the social network “VKontakte”.

People communicate in comments in some public page. Someone can distinguish themselves and quickly answer the interlocutor with a riveted picture with a funny inscription. This image will attract attention, and other users may start posting it in completely different public pages.

This is how a meme can become popular, otherwise it can become viral. It will spread virally across the Internet and appear on forums. And then, as soon as someone says “Zhdun,” many will have that same picture with a gray creature in their heads. The image of expectation that was originally inherent in the meme will arise.

How to make money on memes

You can't make money from Internet memes. This is not the kind of content that can be distributed to on a paid basis. We have already written above that, on the contrary, this is information that spreads spontaneously throughout the network.

But you can use viral internet memes in your marketing. Any viral meme that is easily recognizable can become an excellent news feed in itself. You can change it to suit the theme of your business or your website.

By using memes, you can build credibility among your audience. People trust what they know. And if you use easily recognizable images in your content policy, your subscribers will believe you.

Audience trust is key successful sales. And although you can’t make money directly from Internet memes, you can use such content to increase audience loyalty.

However, we should not forget that in some cases it is better not to use memes. If you have a “serious” audience, they may simply not understand such “comic” material.

Track the mood of your subscribers. Assess what they will be interested in, what they will appreciate, and what they will not.

And don’t forget that memes alone won’t get you far. This type of content may only be used in conjunction with other types of materials.

With the development of social networks, various funny pictures and photos, videos, demotivators, and so on are gaining popularity. Newcomers to the Internet and social networks such as VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter often do not understand what a meme is. Meanwhile, there are more and more memes. Let's try to figure out what it is and what memes are for.

What are VKontakte memes?

A meme is information about a particular phenomenon in life, conveyed with sarcasm or irony (most often memes are placed in pictures or photos). Memes spread very quickly across the Internet and social networks, precisely because they cause a smile and laughter. Users who see a meme for the first time most often send it to their friends, and they, in turn, send it to theirs.

Initially, anecdotes, jokes and funny videos spread so quickly across the Internet, but at the beginning of this century people came up with the idea of ​​captioning pictures with funny phrases. This turned out to be in demand on the Internet, since not many VKontakte users like to read long posts (there is even a phrase “I couldn’t master it, there’s a lot of bukof”).

Memes are short sayings or funny pictures that instantly attract an audience. Most often, their creators are guided by such popular topics, like politics, sports, everyday life (getting up early, for example).

History of the term

We figured out what the word “meme” means, but where did such a term come from? The word was first used by Richard Dawkins in a 1976 book. There, a “meme” was a cultural information that could be multiplied. The study of such information is called “memetics”.

The original word used was "mime", as Professor Dawkins derived the term from a Greek word, but we no longer use this obsolete version. After the book’s release, journalists and media compared memes as understood by Dawkins and the information that was rapidly gaining popularity. They came to the conclusion that they were one and the same.

In the mid-90s, a book by the American Douglas Rushkoff was published, which described the same phenomena as in Dawkins’ book. But Rashkoff chose another word - “media virus” (remember viral advertising- funny videos that covertly advertise something).

Later, some researchers also studied this phenomenon and used the term “meme” in their books.

How to make memes?

To create good meme, you need to carefully monitor current information happening in the world, and, of course, have a sense of humor. After all, if a meme is not funny, it simply will not become popular. Bringing a smile to the faces of social media users is the main meaning of the meme.

For example, after the Russian national football team failed to make it to the playoffs of the 2016 European Championship, memes about the failure of our football players began to spread very quickly. The creators of such memes simply “got in with the flow” and understood what interests Internet users at the moment.

Memes on everyday topics always spread very quickly, people begin to associate themselves with them. For example, if you create a meme on the topic of laziness or constant lateness to school or work and make it really funny, then the reaction will not be long in coming - you will get a lot of likes and reposts.

Thus, to make a good meme, you need to analyze the situation in the world or write about phenomena that are familiar to everyone.

How to make a meme from a photo?

You may have noticed that most memes are made from photographs. To create a meme based on a photo, you need to:

• Find a funny photo in good quality;
• If necessary, crop it (so that the photo does not contain unnecessary logos, advertising, etc.);
• Launch Adobe Photoshop or Paint (the latter is included in standard set programs for Windows). If you have a Mac or newer Windows versions, just click on the photo right click mouse and select “Change”;
• You can start creating - adding something to the photo and writing text.

Of course, the text should be funny, and not anyhow. After all, your goal is to popularize this meme.

Once the meme is created, you can upload it to your social media accounts and see if you get any likes. If not, you may be missing something or not on track.

There are special groups on VKontakte where users can post homemade memes. If other people like them, you can promote your meme faster.

Stories of popular Internet memes

In this section, we'll look at the history of some popular Internet memes.

MemeMe Gusta - grinning face, translated from Spanish as “I like it.” Initially used only in relation to sexual perversions, it later expanded its sphere of influence and lost its original meaning.

Forever alone - "forever alone". Depicts a guy who has no friends and no girlfriend. He was first seen on the Internet in 2010 in comics. If you are creating a meme on the theme of forever alone, then beware of banal themes like “nobody loves me” or “I got a bad mark.”

Y U No - another meme, which appeared for the first time in the USA, translates as “why?” or “why not you?” The origins of the meme lie in a Japanese manga from 2002, from where the picture spread across all social networks.

Pokerface- this meme came about because of poker players. The term means a face that does not express any emotion, so that no one will guess what cards you have in your hand. In 2009, this meme appeared, showing an indifferent attitude towards something. Chuck Norris is often associated with a poker face, as he is not an emotional person.

What are demotivators?

Demotivators appeared on the Russian-language Internet earlier than memes; some even believe that they were the progenitors of the latter. Demotivator - based on the name, a parody of a motivator. This is a picture that does not motivate people, but rather demotivates them. Usually a picture is depicted on a black background, and under it is a signature in white or yellow font. They were also created for laughs.

The fact is that motivational posters are extremely boring, so people with a sense of humor decided to make people laugh. It is worth saying that they succeeded.

But when people who were far from humor began to make demotivators, there was little funny left. Now demotivators have slowly become obsolete; few people make them anymore, because they have been replaced by more popular memes.

Every day something new appears on the Internet and social networks. Often this “new” is not always understandable to the common man. And, if today we figured out what a meme is. It is not a fact that tomorrow some other unusual phenomenon will not appear that requires clarification.

Video: history of memes

If anyone thinks that memes are a new fad associated solely with the Internet, this is a delusion. Information units used to briefly convey a complex set of descriptions of a phenomenon and an emotional attitude to this phenomenon have been widely used before. Some popular memes are used as common nouns in oral speech, without visual reinforcement with a picture on the Internet. One can condemn such a drastic invasion of memetics into daily life, but one should not deny the unconditional ergonomics of the phenomenon, because one word or a short phrase of a meme can convey a whole bunch of emotions, expressions and one’s own attitude.

Popular meme: the shortest way to express an opinion

Printed expressive photographs with original captions, stills from famous films, drawn characters—anything can become a visualization of a meme. Nowadays, popular memes are associated specifically with films, and here is an approximate list of world-famous information units:

• Boromir:
• Charles;
• Robert Downey Jr.;
• Leonardo DiCaprio;
• Grumpy Cat;
• smiling dog;
• lemur "uzbagoin";
• nichosi, lolshto, orly and other memes.

The good thing about memes is that they can be adapted to almost any situation; just take a template and sign the accompanying text. To do this, there are many meme generators on the Internet; you can also use sites for creating demotivators.

You can't just take it and not remember Boromir

This is probably the most popular meme since the triumphant release of the film epic “The Lord of the Rings”. The film was quickly dissected into quotes; all sorts of witty statements were attributed to the expressive characters. However, the main characters were easily surpassed by Boromir with his unique facial expressions at the moment when, at a meeting with Elrond, he says that you can’t just go and take the ring to Mordor.

Like other popular memes, Boromir with his phrase “you can’t just take it” is international. There are many examples on the Internet with texts in different languages, including in Russian. “You can’t just leave grandma without eating”, “you can’t just stop arguing” and other options, from witty to downright banal, but topical.

We lived without memes, Karl!

Another contender for the title of “most popular meme” often appears in the form of cutting frames compiled into a short comic. This is a moment from The Walking Dead. According to the plot, a tragic moment actually occurs here - the main character, Rick, learns that his wife died during a difficult birth, and his son Carl had to finish her off in order to prevent his mother from turning into a walking dead man. The actor’s facial expressions are so expressive that the creators of the memes couldn’t resist.

In the online interpretation, Rick lectures Carl, looking into his face, repeating his name from time to time. “We didn’t have video consoles, we played with sticks in the yard! With sticks, Karl! Like some other popular memes, "Carl" quickly spread beyond the Internet. Now this expressive exclamation “Karl!” seen on billboards, heard in emotional stories. It’s enough to insert the meme “Karl!” at the end of a stormy story; just four letters replace a whole emotional block like “no, just imagine, I’m just shocked, outraged, God, just think about it!”

Robert Downey Jr., Leonardo DiCaprio and other stars

To create a popular meme? there is little desire, an expressive visual accent is required, and here movie stars provide an excellent opportunity. Robert Downey Jr. rolling his eyes became a meme literally the day after the premiere of “The Avengers,” as did his character Tony Stark in a triumphant pose.

Leonardo DiCaprio has become the face of a whole series of different memes, from the champagne shot from The Great Gatsby to the recent film The Revenant. The Oscar ceremony, where he finally received the coveted statuette after so many disappointing nominations, also became a meme. “Like DiCaprio for the Oscar - a widely circulated comparison, they talk about something extremely desirable, but invariably elusive.

With the facial expressions of a crazy maniac, he has his fans. Leonidas with his “This is Sparta!” I also collected a rich harvest of memes, demotivators, coubs and photojabs. Anyone can become the hero of a meme at any time.

Animal memes

Animals are probably the most popular memes on the Internet, the undisputed star of which is Grumpy Cat. The cat has such a gloomy expression on his face that he quickly gained wild success and became the hero of the sarcastic meme “Unbridled Fun” and thousands of other interpretations.

Dog facial expressions have a huge amount expressions, especially charming are the smiles that these charming four-legged animals are capable of. Therefore, “smiling dog” is a broad meme that is not tied to any specific dog. This is what they now call any dog ​​that appears in the frame with a characteristic smile. Moreover, the “smiling dog” also left the Internet and migrated into everyday speech.

A deadpan lemur with advice to calm down in broken Internet slang is known as "Uzbagoysya." There was even a comic song based on this meme, and the advice to “get rid of yourself” can be heard simply on the street.

Memes-emotions

No less popular Internet memes are people depicted schematically, but with bright colors. By and large? Such memes are used as emojis, and in some ways they express emotions more effectively than the neat creations of designers developing new emojis. The latest marketing ploy of the famous social network “Vkontakte” is the “Nichoshi!” emoticon sticker, which literally conveys the emotion of extreme amazement. Oddly enough, the move turned out to be winning, “nichosi!” quickly spread across the RuNet and new memes are already being formed on their basis.